Joint Chair in Women’s Studies

Joint Chair in Women’s Studies, Carleton University and University of Ottawa

In 1985, the Office of the Secretary of State created a Joint Chair in Women’s Studies (JCWS) at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. Four other chairs of women’s studies, in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Halifax, were also established under the same program. Working in both French and English, the incumbent of the Joint Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University teaches, engages in research and participates in appropriate committees and events on both campuses, acts as a resource person on women’s issues and feminist research at both universities, and establishes and maintains contact with local, regional, national and international feminist educational and community-based organizations.

Dr. Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan is the new incumbent of the Joint Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.

She began her 2-year mandate on July 1, 2023.

Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan holds a PhD in Anthropology (2012) from the University of British Columbia. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, where, since 2012, she teaches on gender and sexuality, visual anthropology, and creative and multimodal approaches to research. Currently, her work explores issues related to institutional abandonment, the anthropology of care and bureaucracies, and the social production of disability in school institutions of the Québec city region. The first project revolves around the role of school transportation in access to schooling for autistic students, in a context of crisis in these students’ schooling, as many find themselves unschooled or attending school part-time. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, this project is done in collaboration with Dr. Laurence Simard-Gagnon, and draws on their respective expertise and experiential knowledges. The project focuses on the materiality of school transportation through ethnographic attention to both (i) official policies, managerial practices, and overall governance, and (ii) everyday, intersecting experiences of vulnerabilities for drivers, parents, and students who meet in the disabling space of the van. A second collaborative and participatory project is conducted along with Autisme-Québec, and focuses on documenting experiences of unschooling and partial schooling for autistic students in the Québec city region. Dr. Carrier-Moisan is also involved with the Comité pour le droit à la scolarisation, in collaboration with La ligue des droits et libertés-section Québec, in order to help advance issues around school exclusion of autistic and disabled students.

Dr. Carrier-Moisan has also conducted ethnographic research on sex tourism in Natal, in the northeast of Brazil, including research on questions around the practices of social mobility and intimacies against a backdrop of social and geopolitical inequalities. As part of this work, she has also examined the mobilization of affective logics in campaigns against sex trafficking and sex tourism, including during the 2014 World Cup in Natal, campaigns which too often, have led to patterns of urban exclusion and state abandonment.

Dr. Carrier-Moisan also has a longstanding interest in visual/multimodal anthropology, in the possibilities of doing and telling research otherwise, and in the circulation of feminist knowledges. In collaboration with Dr. William Flynn, who has adapted her research into a graphic narrative, and Débora Santos, a Brazilian illustrator, she has turned her ethnography of sex tourism into a graphic novel, with Gringo Love: Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil, which has also been translated in Portuguese and published in Brazil.

Dr. Carrier-Moisan continues to explore different ways of doing and telling about research in her collaborative research project alongside Dr. Simard-Gagnon, including through the development of narrative cartographies.

During her mandate as Joint Chair in Women’s Studies, Dr. Carrier-Moisan will propose various events on the theme of “Multimodal Scholarships and Feminist, Public Knowledges”. These events will be opportunities to learn and reflect together on creative and multimodal approaches to feminist research and ways of doing and telling research otherwise, drawing inspiration from emerging practices that tend to decenter dominant modes of scientific knowledges and to expand the possibilities of accessible, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial knowledges. She invites members of the student and faculty community, as well as feminist activists, artists, and scholars to join her in the various events and activities she will be organizing at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.

Dr. Carrier-Moisan will also be teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses, (including in English) at Carleton University, “Storying otherwise: feminist scholarships through (ethno)graphic narratives” and in French, at the University of Ottawa, “Raconter la recherche autrement: approches créatives et multimodales des savoirs féministes”.

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